USDA does about-face, won’t jettison Forest Service’s shield logo

by Scott Sandsberry

A plan to drop a recognizable logo in this part of the country — the Forest Service’s iconic shield — generated so much outrage among the agency’s retirees that the idea has been dropped.

In early January, the U.S. Department of Agriculture quietly introduced a policy to phase out all of its sub-agencies’ logos, including the Forest Service’s, and replace them with the USDA symbol.

But that policy was kept so under wraps that not even Pacific Northwest forest supervisors were told. Some of them only heard about it in retrospect late last week — after the USDA had decided, in light of the virulent opposition from the Forest Service’s “Old Smokies” retiree group, to keep the service’s shield logo intact.

“We were all getting ready for a good fight,” said Jim Golden of Sonora, Calif., chairman of the retiree group...

The retirees, though, didn’t swing into action until barely two weeks ago because the new USDA policy — while ostensibly already in force for 31/2 months — wasn’t known to the people in the field.

Questions sent Monday morning by the Yakima Herald-Republic to the office of USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack prompted a short email reply with this statement, which was “to be attributed to ‘a USDA spokesperson’ ”: “The US Forest Service shield is exempted from the One USDA branding directive.”

Also Monday morning, Forest Service headquarters around the country received the same message, with this terse directive, from Forest Service headquarters in Washington, D.C.: “Good morning, colleagues. Per USDA, we are cleared at all levels to provide only the following comment when queried about the (Forest Service) shield. If we get further guidance, we will let you know.”

While current Forest Service employees could not comment on the record, many retirees were aghast at the idea of what they saw as the USDA’s usurping the service’s shield logo.

“I just think that’s horrible,” said Doug Jenkins, who retired as a Naches Ranger District information specialist four months ago. “It doesn’t surprise me, as if they didn’t have better things to do than do away with the Forest Service shield so they can have their own little realm.”

The Forest Service’s logo has been around since the agency’s inception in 1905 under then-chief forester Gifford Pinchot. It was a former Gifford Pinchot National Forest supervisor who was instrumental in marshaling the opposition to the shield logo’s removal...

One retired 34-year employee sent sarcastic congratulations through the USDA’s online feedback forum, calling the new standards “egotistical bureaucratic tunnel vision” and “the best example of top-down, super-centralized, micro-managed piece of bureaucratic direction that it has been my disgust to read.”  

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